Kum & Go Convenience Store
The local Kum & Go convenience store down the street from the office is usually manned with a couple of college aged kids. They are at the register, refilling the coffee pot, cleaning the parking lot and doing lots of tasks throughout the day. Each store must have 1,000 items in inventory. So how do they keep track of all of the gum, chips and cigarettes and keep the supply chain efficient while managing all of the other tasks?
Dave was running the register this morning. As soon as he gave me change for my coffee purchase, he pulled out a Symbol handheld device and was quickly in the automotive section counting quarts of oil and ice scrapers. Kum & Go has a slick system where Dave can count his inventory in a short amount of time on a mobile computer, then take this to the PC behind the counter, dock it and then the device downloads all of the information to headquarters in Iowa.
Kum & Go is not a Fortune 1000 company with a huge staff of I.T. people running systems, but they have discovered the value of mobility.
I was at a local convenience store today and noticed a delivery man standing with the store manager, looking at a little black box, about half the size of a desktop keyboard. All of the sudden, two pieces of paper pop out of it, the manager signs it as if he was closing the tab at a restaurant.
The delivery driver works for Solaray and I stopped him and asked him about his little machine. What he was holding was a small mobile printer with an Intermec (they make some of the best rugged mobile handhelds in the world) wireless device imbedded in it. The driver was delivering sunglasses, lighters and other trinkets to stock the convenience store shelves. He just consummated the transaction and notified headquarters without a single piece of paperwork, instantly, with this little marvel.
Solaray is a small, privately held company based in Sapulpa, OK. Sapulpa is known for Frankoma Pottery, not leading edge technology development. Solaray recognized the importance of mobile technology and had a company develop the platform for them, then purchased the company! No wonder they can manage 15,000 delivery locations across the United States.
Those who have been in the mobile applications business since the PDA days have experienced the innovation and buying cycles many times. When we were at Palm’s first developers conference in 1997, a majority of the attendees were developing the next biggest game beyond backgammon. Individual or consumer based applications were a big hit until wireless data networks started working on PDAs. The industry forgot about games and rushed to the new frontier, business applications. The color screen was then announced, and a new wave of games and consumer apps flooded the market. Then the ability to synchronize email shifted industry focus back to the high ARPU promises of the small and medium sized businesses and the Fortune 1000.
Today, there are hundreds of thousands of ring tones, games, and personal applications in the market and it seems the industry has forgotten the business customer once again. The demands of the commercial market in each of these cycles is always lagging as the business customer has higher standards (security, version control etc.) and demands some ROI for the investment. With 100′s of millions of new Smartphone owners, the pendulum will be swinging back to the interests of the business user, and maybe sooner than we think. ABI Research just announced that 16.5% of surveyed Smartphone users spent between $100 and $499 on applications.
That seems like an awful lot of ring tones and $1 games from the app store. Something else is going on. Stay tuned.
I’ve been meeting with several different types of managed services companies around the country. The typical MS company is providing network, PC and email administration and 24/7 support for small crashes or major disaster recovery episodes. All of them are serving small-to-medium businesses who do not have a robust IT department, or maybe not one at all. The MS company has become a mission critical partner in today’s business operations. No PCs, no Internet access, no email usually equals no revenue.
Mobile workers are now introducing a new level of challenges as their smartphones, rugged devices, cell phones and wireless laptops make them a part of the mission critical profile in business operations. Yet, while talking through the technical capabilities, value proposition, understanding of the fragmentation of the mobile solution ecosystem and what seems like an obvious high margin value-add service for the the MS MS company, I don’t get the sense that the MS industry is fully prepared to extend its services to the mobile worker.
